


Scars

by Barbarawire1867



Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV), The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Gen, not graphic descriptions of harm, will add more tags as needed
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-30
Updated: 2018-05-30
Packaged: 2019-05-16 06:40:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,182
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14806265
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Barbarawire1867/pseuds/Barbarawire1867
Summary: A look into the scars that Mick and Len have.  The first two chapters will look at the physical scars, and the last two chapters will describe the mental and emotional scars.





	Scars

**Author's Note:**

> Changed Mick's uncle's name from Richard to Roland, because, as Crypticbeliever123 pointed out, Richard is Mick's dad's name

Mick’s scars are mostly burn scars.  His fingers are the worst – decades of burns stacked on top of each other.  The earliest ones are almost innocent: a few from accidentally touching a hot stove and a few from little fingers getting to close to candles. 

Striped across those early scars are ones from the days when he first discovered matches, letting the flame burn until it singed his fingers.

Mick doesn’t know how or why he developed such an obsession with fire.  He just knows that it’s been there ever since he can remember, and that nothing is as important to him.

He has several larger burns from the day his family burned alive.  He’d been playing with the flame on the gas stove when he’d knocked the bottle of cooking oil.  The fire had flared up suddenly, causing second degree burns across his hands and chest.  If Mick had been thinking clearly, he would have yelled for help and left the area, but, blinded by the flames and oblivious to the pain, he had stayed, watching the fire grow and spread.

As the flames got higher and spread further, a thick black smoke had filled the air.  The noxious gas was super heated, and as he breathed it in, it caused burs to his throat and his lungs.  Luckily, his coughing prompted him to move, and he stumbled outside and watched his house, his family and his entire life burn up in the most glorious blaze.

After words, when the glow and the heat had alerted the neighbors and the firefighters had arrived, Mick was sent to live with his Uncle Roland.

Roland Rory was not abusive, but he was negligent and unprepared to deal with children.  Mick soon learned how to care for himself.  He learned how to do laundry, and how to get to school, and how to cook.  Mick found that he liked cooking, both for the practical applications of fire and for the way the little burns he acquired would linger for days and weeks afterwards.

In school, Mick found that he was an outcast.  Other kids either mocked him or avoided him, having heard about how his house had burned down.  Teachers were dismissive, writing him off as unfocused and unintelligent.  Mick found his fingers twitching and his mind constantly searching for a focus.  He found a discarded lighter one day and had the important revelation that the tiny flame was capable of focusing and calming his mind.

When Mick was sad, he used the lighter.  When he was angry, he used the lighter.  When he was lonely and homesick, he used the lighter.  When things were especially bad, he lit little fires made of leaves and scraps of paper.  And when his lighter ran out, he used some of his meager allowance to buy another.

When Mick was fourteen, Bobby McMillan and his friends stole his lighter.  They played a cruel game of keep away, mocking him for getting so upset he began to shake and hyperventilate.

The next night, Mick bought a new lighter and a can of gas and set Bobby McMillan’s garage – which housed Bobby’s most valued possession, his bike – ablaze.  Mick’s pant leg caught fire in the process, and he watched the little flame grow for several seconds, before stop, dropping, and rolling like they taught in school.  The scar that he got from that bubbled viciously for several weeks.

Mick didn’t run from the scene of the crime, and when the cops took him away he felt no regret.  He was sentenced to four years in juvie – long enough that he’d be an adult by the time he got out.

Juvie was an eye-opening experience for Mick.  Kids there were tough, and the ones that weren’t became so quickly.  A lot were from foster homes and had run away, finding a better home among their peers.  Other kids were in for minor things, like shoplifting and vandalism.  A few, like Mick, were in for bigger stuff, from auto theft to attempted murder to actual murder.

Mick’s first week, he kept his head down, but one of the kids, a little rat whose father was a big man in the Falconi crime family, felt the need to impress upon Mick the pecking order.  The mini Falconi got his friends to hold Mick down, then carved four straight lines into his ribs.  Those wounds scarred into thick, raised white stripes.

Mick hated feeling helpless, a feeling that was only exacerbated by the fact that he had no matches or lighters.  He vowed to become stronger, and took to working out everyday.  The other kids soon learned to give him a wide berth.

However, just because the kids backed off, didn’t mean the guards did.  Officer Alvarez had a nasty habit of smoking, and an even nastier habit of using Mick as an ashtray.  Mick’s arms and shoulders grew to sport a series of burn circles, which rubbed harshly under his clothes.  One on his bicep became infected, and resulted in a blistery-looking scar about three inches long.

Mick, who was on a laundry detail, ended up sending Officer Alvarez to the hospital with a vicious burn in the shape of an iron across his face.  Mick considered the week in solitary an acceptable trade for the lighter he nicked from the Officer’s pocket.

When Mick was sixteen, he stepped in front of a shiv and saved Leonard Snart from being beat by Falconi and his gang.  The shiv glanced off his pectorals, leaving what would become a four-inch white scar.  The incident also left him with a lifelong partner.

After Snart came into the picture, Mick gathered significantly less scars.  Over the next twenty years, the only scars he got were: small lacerations on the back of his head from a bottle being broken over it in a bar fight; assorted minor burns from extended proximity to fire; and a gun shot wound in the lower thigh from a heist crew member gone rogue.  Thanks to Snart (or Len, as he began calling him during an endorphin rush after their first successful major heist) Mick’s body was kept relatively scar free.

That was, until 2014 and the warehouse explosion. 

It was supposed to have been a simple grab-n-go painting heist, but Mick and Len had had a vicious fight beforehand.  The focus of the fight didn’t matter, it just mattered that Mick was upset and didn’t stick to the plan.  In his anger, Mick set fire to the warehouse they were supposed to rob, and ended up trapping himself inside.

When Len finally got him out, over half Mick’s body was covered in burns of differing severity.

Len had told Mick right there, next to the place where their plans were literally going up in flames, with his expression ice cold, that they were through.

Mick ended up breaking out of the ambulance that came for him and healing his burns in a rundown little safehouse with just himself, his burnt flesh, and the ashes of the only friendship he’d ever had.


End file.
